The foundation of a successful telemarketing campaign is valid, accurate data: a low-quality database will lead to equally low-quality results. Nigel Blake, Managing Director of telemarketing company Perfect Pitch, gives us an example
“One client that engaged with us was undertaking an e-marketing campaign, so they’d hired designers to make changes to their website and create their e-shot. They had costs for the telemarketing campaign, they had costs for brochures, and they had a sales team waiting for a glut of appointments.” So far so good…
“Unfortunately, it turned out that something like 92% of the people they had sent the e-shot to no longer worked at the companies, which was disappointing. A good thing to do ahead of a campaign is to do a small test of 50 or 100 records, before investing too much time and treasure in your efforts.”
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The biggest driver of telemarketing ROI may not be the effort you put in, but the data you utilise to underpin it. Good data is vital to a successful campaign – and Nigel Blake agrees.
Less is more
“We meet so many businesses with enormous databases that they have accrued over two, five or ten years, with thousands of records in a bit of a muddle,” Nigel tells us. His key data mantra is ‘quality over quantity’.
“Less is always more. Better to have a small database which is current and reliable, than an old, large database that is in a bit of a mess. It is suggested that data ages at 20% per annum, so if you buy 100 records of IT managers in Surrey, this time next year, it will only be 80% accurate and in 2-3 years time, close to 50% of those IT managers will no longer be in post.”
The first question that Nigel will ask a client is whether they are confident in their data: “They’ll say that their data is great, but we have certainly been given databases to work with where no more than 10% of the data is accurate.”
The statistics back up Nigel’s experience, with research from Experian indicating that 75% of businesses waste an average of 14% of revenue on bad quality data, which equates to £198m every year.
Where you keep your data makes a difference, as Nigel points out, “Some businesses store their data in a CRM – Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zoho and so forth, but others have it sat in a spreadsheet. If your employees are actively using your CRM for order management or engagement, it is being self-maintained, whereas if you bought some data for an e-shot two years ago and haven’t touched it since, it’s likely to be very old.”
Nigel is very clear about what to do with old data, “As a general rule of thumb, I think that once your database gets beyond two or three years old – assuming you haven’t done any work on it – I would be inclined to throw it in the bin and start again.”
Right side of the law
Bad data can be damaging to your business. Sending marketing materials to staff that no longer work at an organisation immediately puts you on the back foot, because it is clear that you do not value the relationship enough to maintain accurate records. If you are not confident in the quality of your own data, you could either get it cleansed or buy in a new set.
Reputational damage is not the only risk to your business, as there is now legislation in place to regulate the use of data, governed by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). These changes have ushered in a new era of telemarketing, where it is important to ensure that if you do buy in data, you get it from a reputable source.
As Nigel says, “Established data brokers, such as Corpdata, should provide you with accurate, well-sourced data, but should also be ticking the compliance boxes.” All of this means it is less likely that there will be issues with the data, and your business will be less exposed to complaints that could attract the attention of the ICO.
We’ll leave the last words to Nigel; “Think of the time and money you spend on your website, your marketing materials and training your staff. The marketing data you use is the foundation on which this effort is built, so why treat it as an afterthought?”
